The Sanctuary

The Sanctuary and Other Stories is a collection of four short works of varying content and subject matter. All are fictional and cater to readers of all ages.

Here are some brief descriptions of the four short stories included in this book: The Sanctuary is a story about a twelve year old lad who is hoping to bag a wild turkey for his family’s Thanksgiving, but deep in the woods something goes wrong and suddenly he is in a life or death situation. Top Of The Ninth, a baseball story that begins with a small boy who loves baseball and wishes he had someone to play with. The story opens on a small rural farm in North Florida, but soon the reader is in the World Series. This onomatopoetic story will be enjoyed by everyone from 9 to 90. The Reunion deals with the transition from life to death. Many who have read it have said that it is therapeutic. Dr. Calloway’s Wild Adventure On The Wacissa River is a chapter taken from a novel I have epublished, No Purchase On Tomorrow. Tommy Lee, a wild and crazy tree man has come into Dr. Calloway’s life. She is a refined Latin scholar who is physically challenged and is forced to use a wheelchair. Tommy Lee is taking her on a redneck outing down the Wacissa River to go scuba diving. Can you imagine?

My name is John Wesley Brown. I grew up on a small farm in rural Leon County outside of Tallahassee, Florida. I attended Florida State University. I dropped out of school and worked in heavy construction in Indiana to save enough money to take my very pregnant Jewish wife at the time to Israel to live on a kibbutz. Israel paid my wife’s way, but since I was a gentile, a goy to some, I had to pay my own way. I was the first and only redneck living in Israel. I taught the Kibbutzniks a thing or two about farming as well as other things. I lived a year on the kibbutz and had limited training on the Uzi. The safety factor in Israel was becoming questionable so I sent my wife and child back to the United States, but I stayed through the Six Day War. During that year in Israel I wrote novels and short stories in longhand, but upon returning to the U.S. I was unable to read my own handwriting. We divorced and I reentered Florida State University and took course work in photography, film, art history, and the humanities. I wrote some papers and even had some published. I graduated in 1971. But I kept getting nice ladies pregnant and had to give up writing and go into business to support me and all of them. After working in construction for a few years, I started the first tent and party business in Tallahassee in 1975. I sold it for a hunk of money in 2000 and prepared myself to go back to writing. But my love at that time shocked me with the news that while I was putting in all those long hours and paying off all the debts, she had developed another life and for sure didn’t want to be married to someone struggling to be a writer. Who can blame her? I got my third and final divorce in 2001 and said good-by to most of the money, but kept writing. I have been married three times and have three daughters and several grandchildren. As of this writing, I have epublished three novels and this collection of short stories. (There are more novels in the works.) I also have epublished a collection of creepy short stories that can be found under the title; The Lioness, And More Creepy Strange Stories.